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At the entrance to “At the Far Edge of Words,” the 30-plus year survey of the work of Jamelie Hassan at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, a crisp Arabic character glows in chilly blue-white neon against a backdrop of glossy black tile. It’s not inviting, and maybe that’s the point.

Hassan, born in London, Ont., to Lebanese parents, has bumped up against the challenges, perils and occasional joys of being from here, but also there, all of her life. The character, “noon,” is a chapter heading in the Qu’ran, which, in this era of unmatched paranoia regarding the Islamic faith, is almost impossible to read as anything less than a provocation. It’s as a good a starting point as any to Hassan’s fraught politicality and parsing of the immigrant experience in small-city Canada.

Indeed, Hassan’s life and artistic output are run through with a sense of otherness. The exhibition, which opens with a splashy fete Sept. 7, uses a poem by the Palestinian poet laureate Mahmoud Darwish as a sort of spirit guide. Its title is telling: “I Am From There.” Hassan, though, is acutely aware that she is also from here, and the hybridity of her perspective and experience both gives her workforce and occasionally reduces it to one-note scolding.

The blunt provocation of Noon, made in 2009, is one of the latter: more a dare than an invitation to understanding. Take the dare and, inside, you’re greeted with Al Jazeera/Prisoner 245, another glaring neon work Hassan crafted in 2008 as a critique of several western nations, Canada included, refusing to carry the Arabic-language news network. (The piece reads, in Arabic, “I’b a shoom,” which translates to “shame on you,” shaped and curled into a likeness of the Al Jazeera logo; the “shame” also extends to the detention of one of the network’s cameramen at Guantanamo Bay for more than six years.)

If these recent pieces are your introduction to Hassan’s work, it’s a bit of a shame. Over the 30-odd years she’s been making work, her political concerns have hardly been veiled, but they’ve also had the benefit of complex layering and personal experience that give them a quiet force far more potent than these admonishments. Thankfully, “At the Far Edge of Words” is full of these things, and a full picture of Hassan herself and the binary world she inhabits comes into clear view.

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One stirring older piece, The Hong Kong, For Dave and Lucy, from 1984, is both a tribute to a married couple whose London restaurant, the Hong Kong, was ravaged and defiled in a racist attack, and a totem for immigrants of any background who have faced the baseless tortures of a country in which they sought something better, something new.

Hassan questions that simplistic equation — new equals better — at every turn, and stirringly in one of her earliest works from 1980. Called Beyrouth — Is War Art?, the work pairs a series of photographs of ruined cityscapes that Hassan took while visiting her parents’ homeland, with a brick wall she dismantled at a London gallery. Here, the equation deepens with an exploration of artifice versus reality: with Hassan, as both an artist and a de facto political exile, being intimate with both.

Displacement is the trenchant theme that runs through Hassan’s practice, despite her being Canadian-born. The gamut of inequities — religious, ethnic, gender — inform her practice regardless on which side of the geographic divide she chooses to stand. One of her early film works, The Oblivion Seekers from 1985, draws on her family archive as well as news media to portray the bewildering foreignness of the Muslim diaspora, as seen by the Canadian news media in 1955 when the first ever Islamic convention took place in her hometown of London.

Montages of men and women singing, dancing, chanting, her own family footage of her grandmother’s house in Lebanon merge with blaring newspaper headlines and photography clearly at odds with how to capture this onslaught of otherness (London, Ont., in 2012 would not number among anybody’s top 10 cosmopolitan cities in Canada; 1955, I can only imagine). Above all, though, The Oblivion Seekers reads almost as a glimpse into Hassan’s conflicted, hybrid soul.

For my money, the most powerful piece here in that key — and maybe period — is Common Knowledge, from 1980-81. For it, Hassan embraced the traditional Middle-Eastern practice of ceramics, but to fashion faithful facsimiles of her domestic, middle-Canadian life. One panel has painted on it a Susanna Moodie-ish character, in Victorian dress and hair in bun, paddling a canoe; there is a plate of bread in the centre. A newspaper front page reports an earthquake in Haiti, reminding Hassan, in no uncertain terms that, in Canada, bad things are what happen somewhere else.

Nonetheless, the objects circle the politicality of Hassan’s two-world existence. Boyce Richardson’s book Strangers Devour the Land, about the Cree of James Bay and their battle against Hydro-Quebec to keep massive hydroelectric dam projects off their land, is rendered here as a stirring comment on dominance, power and control in modern Canada. Coming closer to home still is Hassan’s handwrought panel recreating a rejection letter from Immigration Canada, denying her grandmother and uncles entry into Canada. With it, Hassan captures, in a warmingly homespun way, the strange remove of a tidy first world at the same time as it emphasizes the trade-off, of violence and domination for the more polite, bloodless tyranny of bureaucracy.

More than 30 years old, it feels fresh, vital and painfully current. In other words, its power is also its shame — something Hassan has always known.

Jamelie Hassan: I Am From There has its opening reception Sept. 7 at 6 p.m. The show is currently open to the public. www.mocca.ca

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